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Keith Ellison: Peter King comments ‘ridiculous’

Rep. Keith Ellison on Monday slammed as “wrong” and “ridiculous” Rep. Peter King’s rationale for wanting more surveillance of Muslim communities in the wake of the Boston bombings.

“It’s true that well over 99 percent of the Muslim community is [composed of] absolutely loyal, law-abiding Americans who are as offended by what happened in Boston as any other American,” Ellison (D-Minn.) said on MSNBC’s “News Nation with Tamron Hall,” echoing King. “That’s true. But after that, my friend Representative King is wrong again.”

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King (R-N.Y.), who has said that the vast majority of American Muslims are good people, is also calling for greater law enforcement focus on that community.

“When you’re going after the Mafia you go to Italian communities… If you’re looking for Islamic terrorism, you focus on Muslim communities,” he told POLITICO over the weekend, also arguing that “We’re at war with Islamic terrorism. It’s coming from people within the Muslim community by the terrorists coming from that community, just like the Mafia comes from Italian communities.”

Ellison said such surveillance is unprecedented.

“The FBI did not go after all Italians or all Irish people,” said Ellison, who was introduced on the show as “the first Muslim elected to Congress.” “No one ever said, let’s surveil a whole ethnic community. They went after people who were criminals and who were exhibiting criminal behavior. Now the fact that those people happen to be of a particular ethnic origin was not really the causal effect. The issue was what they were doing.

“And so again, it is just ridiculous, I mean to say that because of the Westies, that every Irish person was under suspect, everyone in America knows that’s ridiculous,” he said. “But still he wants to cast a wide net with regard to Muslims.”

King’s comments came as reports emerged indicating that at least one of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings, who is of Chechen origin, had ties to radical Islam.

“The fact is if you were to ask American Muslims, where is Chechnya on the map, most of us would never know,” Ellison said. “We would have to find a map and look for it. But so you’re talking to people who know literally nothing about the conflict these individuals may be motivated by. So it is just, one thing it does, is it targets people unfairly, but it wastes valuable resources. We need to channel resources where they are most needed, which is on behavior.”